Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Byrd on a Flight of Fancy?

A perfect head first slide into home plate last night by Darwin Barney scored the only run of the game and gave the Cubs a nice win over the Brewers at Wrigley. Certainly we would love to see more of this type of clutch quality win by the Cubs as opposed to the 39 losses we've seen thus far. But never fear my fellow Cubs brethren in spite of being 11 games out of the division lead and only a couple losses from the worse record in baseball - "it's not to late". This according to Marlon Byrd in his Byrd's Nest Blog the other day. He has a point, if the Cubs can trim the lead as he said by "the All-Star break, and be five, six games out, we still have a chance". You've got to love Byrd's optimistic attitude, especially in spite of his frightening injury that put him on the DL.

The Cubs have been a revolving door of injured players this year and that never helps, but some of those players like outfielders Byrd, Reed Johnson, and Alfonso Soriano who went 1-4 at the plate last night in a rehab game in Iowa, are all due to return soon. So according to the Byrd scenario the Cubs have about 1 month to trim five or six games off the lead and get back into this thing. If the Cubs can't do that it's likely we will be seeing more of a line-up similar to last night in which you had these Cubs hitters one after another - Montanez, LeMahieu, then Campana. If you had said back in spring training that those three would all be starting a game at Wrigley together in mid-June, you would have immediately thought - "what in the name of Orval Overall is going on"? OK, maybe only my 102 year old great uncle Eldon would say that but you get the point.

So on the optimistic side the Cubs have a month to play some serious baseball and make the rest of the season potentially meaningful. On the pessimistic side (some might say realistic), this is a flawed team that never really had a shot coming out of the gate. After last night's win I'm going to hold out for the optimistic side, at least until the end of tonight's game, then I may change my mind.

I had mentioned in a prior blog about some big news here at Boys of Spring and it is still on the way...coming very soon. So please be patient, as Cubs fans that is something we should all be good at.